As always, there were a lot of changes since the last snapshot. These changes are also available to existing installations via the pkg update && pkg upgrade procedure.

General system changes

The most notable change for users is migration to the FreeBSD Loader. After installing new packages the next beadm activate will activate the new loader and remove GRUB. See here for additional information, possible issues, and configuration help. This improvement allows us to modify the text installer so that it can be installed with the operating system on RAIDZ/mirror ZFS pools.

Intel KMS (based on Oracle's version) was ported to OpenIndiana by Martin Bochnig. The current implementation has some rough edges and supports only 6th and 7th generation of Intel video adapters. However, it is clearly a giant step forward for desktop users. The list of tested devices and additional information can be found here.

Python 2.6 was removed. Python 2.7 is default system python now.

Sun SSH was completely removed. Unfortunately, due to a bug in IPS (which is already fixed in newer versions), the package update can fail because of packages being renamed relating to Sun SSH removal. If you see this error:

during system update, then edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config with your favorite text editor and, for example, add an empty line to it. This will allow you to proceed and get into an updated operating system (including the new IPS version which has this bug fixed).

Mate 1.14 was integrated. It is installed by default with new GUI installations. GDM was replaced by lightdm. If you want to install it on an existing installation, just update your system and run:

pkg install mate_install
pkg uninstall mate_install

to install the metapackage, which pulls all needed packages, and then remove the metapackage itself.

One more noticeable change in the installer – now it generates full USB images, which can be directly copied to USB sticks. 1G/2G header files are longer required.

Please note that openindiana is moving towards a pure 64-bit environment. 32-bit support is obsolete and will be entirely removed in a future release.

Desktop software and libraries

Mate 1.14 was integrated

Firefox was updated to 45.4.0

Thunderbird was updated to 45.4.0

Mesa was updated to 12.0.3

Xorg libraries, fonts and tools were updated, including freetype-2, fontconfig and other. XNV/x-s12-clone gate almost completely was integrated in oi-userland.Now Xorg libraries and applications versions are equal to or more recent than S12 ones.

CUPS was updated to 1.7.5

Inkscape was updated to 0.91

Lightdm 1.19.3 was integrated

FUSE modules for ntfs-3g were added

The OpenOffice component, which had a long standing issue with saving documents in different formats (https://www.illumos.org/issues/5210), was dropped. Users are advised to use libreoffice from SFE localhostoih repository instead.

As always, we are proud to deliver to you latest illumos-gate bits (i.e. illumos-2816291).

Also note that we provide repository with Xorg 1.18.4 for testing here.

Unfortunately, some issues with Xorg 1.18 and new intel driver were found during testing, so it wasn't integrated in current snapshot.

Note that we continue to transform oi-userland according tocategories layout. We added logic to install required components before building the software. New components have to specify their dependencies in REQUIRED_PACKAGES Makefile variable. You can use the make REQUIRED_PACKAGES target to add at least runtime dependencies to the list. Full documentation about these changes is available in oi-userland. GPG signature checking for components' archives was added to oi-userland. If Makefile contains COMPONENT_SIG_URL with URL of archive's PGP signature, and signature is correct, archive is considered valid even if sha256 checksum don't match. If signature is incorrect or missing, archive checksum is compared to expected one.